Issue #7780 has been updated by duerst (Martin Dürst).
What about using load for the safe method and load! for the non-safe method? That would be the Ruby way.
Otherwise, in particular for Yaml, I think it's way better to have load and dangerous_load rather than load and safe_load.
----------------------------------------
Bug #7780: Marshal & YAML should deserialize only basic types by default.
https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/7780#change-35822
Author: marcandre (Marc-Andre Lafortune)
Status: Assigned
Priority: Normal
Assignee: matz (Yukihiro Matsumoto)
Category:
Target version: 2.0.0
ruby -v: r39035
YAML is a wonderful, powerful and expressive format to serialize data in a human readable way.
It can be used, for example, to read and write nice configuration files, to store strings, numbers, dates & times in a hash.
YAML.load will, by default, instantiate any user class and set instance variables directly.
On the other hand, this can make apparently innocent code lead to major vulnerabilities, as was clearly illustrated by different exploits recently.
I feel YAML.load should, by default, be safe to use, for example by instantiating only known core classes.
The same can be said for Marshal, even though it would more rarely be used as a public interface to exchange data.
Maybe the following transition path could be taken:
1) Have {YAML|Marshal}.load issue a warning (once) that next minor will only deserialize basic types.
2) Create {YAML|Marshal}.unsafe_load, which does the same thing as current `load`, without a warning of course.
As these changes are compatible and extremely minor, I would like them to be considered for Ruby 2.0.0. They also make for a
"Secure by default" is not a new concept.
Rails 3.0 has XSS protection by default, for example. The fact that one needs to do extra processing like calling `raw` when that security needs to be bypassed makes XSS attacks less likely.
I believe the typical use of Yaml.load is to load basic types.
We should expect users to use the easiest solution, so that should be the safe way.
If a tool makes the safe way of doing things the default, and makes it easy to do more complex deserializing (e.g. whitelisting some user classes), this can only lead to less vulnerabilities.
I hope nobody will take offence that I've tagged this issue as a "bug". The current behavior is as speced, but it can be argued that a design that is inherently insecure is a defect.
--
http://bugs.ruby-lang.org/